Saturday, October 12, 2013

The Last Days of the GOP

The Last Days of the GOP

We could be witnessing the death throes of the Republican Party

I once wrote about lobbying, and this week I called some Republicans I
used to talk to (and some that they recommended I talk to) about the
effect the shutdown is having on the Republican Party in Washington. The
response I got was fear of Republican decline and loathing of the Tea
Party: One lobbyist and former Hill staffer lamented the “fall of the
national party,” another the rise of “suburban revolutionaries,” and
another of “people alienated from business, from everything.” There is a
growing fear among Washington Republicans that the party, which has
lost two national elections in a row, is headed for history’s dustbin.
And I believe that they are right to worry.
The battle over the
shutdown has highlighted the cracks and fissures within the party. The
party’s leadership has begun to lose control of its members in Congress.
The party’s base has become increasingly shrill and is almost as
dissatisfied with the Republican leadership in Washington as it is with
President Obama. New conservative groups have echoed, and taken
advantage of, this sentiment by targeting Republicans identified with
the leadership for defeat. And a growing group of Republican
politicians, who owe their election to these groups, has carried the
battle into the halls of Congress. That is spelling doom for the
Republican coalition that has kept the party afloat for the last two
decades.
American
party coalitions are heterogeneous, but they endure as along as the
different groups find more agreement with each other than with the
opposition. After Republicans won back the Congress in 1994, they
developed a political strategy to hold their coalition together. Many
people contributed to the strategy including Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove,
Paul Coverdell, Paul Weyrich, and Ralph Reed, but the chief architect
was probably Grover Norquist, a political operative who, along with Rove
and Reed, came of age in the early Reagan years. The strategy was based
on creating an alliance between business, which had sometimes divided
its loyalties between Republicans and Democrats, and the array of social
and economic interest groups that had begun backing Republicans.
In
weekly meeting held on Wednesdays at the office of his Americans for
Tax Reform, Norquist put forth the idea that business groups, led by the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent
Business (NFIB), but also including the specialized trade associations,
should back socially conservative Republican candidates, while
right-to-life or gun rights organizations should back tax cuts and
deregulation. What would bind the different parts together was a common
opposition to raising taxes, which Norquist framed in a pledge he
demanded that Republican candidates make. Business could provide the
money, and the single-issue and evangelical groups the grassroots energy
to win elections.

The strategy worked reasonably well, especially in House races. The Chamber and NFIB became election-year arms of the Republican Party.
In Congress, a succession of leaders, including Gingrich, Dennis
Hastert, Tom DeLay, and Roy Blunt, followed the strategy. Gingrich
initially overreached, and DeLay took ethical end-runs, but by the time
John Boehner became Minority Leader in 2007, it had been refined. Its
economic approach consisted of promoting cuts in taxes, spending, and
regulation. Boehner, as lobbyists close to him explained to me, wanted
to use the battle over continuing resolutions and the debt ceiling to
achieve incremental changes on these fronts. He did not contemplate
shutting down the government or allowing the government to default on
its obligations.
But Boehner was forced to adopt the more extreme
strategy. Norquist blames Cruz. “Boehner had a strategy,” Norquist told
me, “but Ted Cruz blew it up.” That is, however, giving Cruz too much
credit (or blame) for the result. Cruz did help convince House
Republicans that if they linked passage of a continuing resolution to
repealing Obamacare, he could get the votes in the Senate to follow
suit. But Cruz was following a script that had been developed earlier.
What has happened over the last two months, leading to the shutdown, and
political paralysis in Washington, is the result of deeper factors that
have put Norquist’s entire “center-right” strategy in jeopardy.
Since the late 1960s, America has seen the growth of what the late Donald Warren in a 1976 book The Radical Centercalled “middle American radicalism.” It’s anti-establishment, anti-Washington, anti-big business and
anti-labor; it’s pro-free market. It’s also prone to scapegoating
immigrants and minorities. It’s a species of right-wing populism. It
ebbed during the Reagan years, but began to emerge again under the
patrician George H.W. Bush and found expression in support for Ross
Perot and for Pat Buchanan with his “peasants with pitchforks.” And it
undergirded the Republican takeovers of Congress in 1994. It ebbed
during George W. Bush’s war on terror, but has re-emerged with a
vengeance in the wake of the Great Recession, Obama’s election and
expansion of government, and continuing economic stagnation.
In his current column in The New York Times, Tom Edsall cites the extensive polling evidence for this rising anger. According to a Pew survey in
late September, anger against the government “is most palpable among
conservative Republicans” and overlaps with Republicans who “support the
Tea Party.” But as with the Perot and Buchanan voters, these
conservatives direct their anger equally at Republican and Democratic
leaders. According to another Pew survey,
65 percent of the Republicans vote in primaries “disapprove of
Republican leaders in Congress.” They see Republican leaders as being
complicit in whatever they find wrong with Washington.
This
anti-Washington sentiment, which is loosely identified with the “Tea
Party,” has overshadowed and transformed grassroots Republicanism.
Republican leaders like DeLay were able to keep the evangelicals and
other social conservatives in line by battling gay marriage or late-term
abortions. But as I recounted three
years ago, many of these social issue activists have been absorbed into
the Tea Party’s anti-government, anti-establishment ethos. In their
current report on the GOP, based on focus groups, the Democracy Corps affirms
this conclusion. Evangelicals, the report says, “think many Republicans
have lost their way” and that the party leadership “has proved too
willing to ‘cave’ to the Obama agenda.” They identify with the Tea Party
groups (even though they may disagree on social issues) because they
see them “standing up and pushing back.”
During George H.W.
Bush’s presidency, these kind of sentiments were directed at moderates
like House Minority Leader Robert Michel or Senate Minority Leader Bob
Dole, but they are now aimed at erstwhile conservatives like Mitch
McConnell and Boehner. The new grassroots Republicans are Warren’s
middle American radicals. They don’t necessarily have clear overall
objectives. They do want to blow up government—whether by eliminating
the debt or repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. And whatever they
want to do, they want done immediately and without compromise. And they
regard those like Boehner who compromise and are willing to settle for
incremental changes as “RINOs”—Republicans in name only.
As this
Republican anti-establishment has surged, new groups have arisen in
Washington to respond to it, while older groups have attempted to adapt
and keep pace. The Club for Growth, perhaps the best known of these, and
the one with which I am the most familiar, actually dates back to the
early ‘90s when several Wall Streeters created a club to fund promising
candidates. The Club’s initial agenda was to promote Jack Kemp-style
growth policies, and their first big success was in getting Christy
Whitman (a RINO if there ever was one!) elected governor of New Jersey
on an anti-tax platform.
The current Club, under former
Congressman Chris Chocola, expends much of its effort on backing
conservative Republicans against other conservative Republicans whom it
believes are too close to the Republican leadership in Washington. The
operative terms in the Club’s jargon are “outsiders” against the
“establishment.” In 2012, for instance, the Club poured over $700,000
into backing a little known dentist, Scott Keadle, against Richard
Hudson. The two men had very similar positions, but Keadle, Chocola
explained to me, was “very much an outsider,” while Hudson had worked
for a Republican House member and was backed by Majority Leader Eric
Cantor’s PAC.
Other groups have followed a similar strategy of
backing maverick conservatives against establishment conservatives. They
include FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity both of which came
out of the breakup of Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Senate
Conservatives Fund, which was founded by South Carolina Senator Jim
DeMint in 2010 before he resigned to become head of the Heritage
Foundation. They are supplemented by blogs and web pages like Erick
Erickson’s RedState and by policy groups like the Heritage Foundation’s
Heritage Action.
These
groups don’t get most of their funding from traditional Republican
sources on K Street. Much of their money comes from multi-millionaires
and billionaires who are not responsible to stockholders. These include
the Koch Brothers, who fund Americans for Prosperity, and investors and
hedge fund operators J.W. Childs, James Simons, and Robert Arnott, who
are among the chief funders of the Club for Growth. Most of these
funders espouse an extreme libertarianism—the Koch brothers were early
backers of the Cato Institute—but they also stand to benefit from the
kind of drastic reduction in government regulations and taxes that the
groups and their candidates advocate.
The groups are sometimes
believed to be part of a single giant conspiracy led by the Koch
brothers, but that is not the case. The Koch brothers started Americans
for Prosperity after they became dissatisfied with Dick Armey’s
FreedomWorks, and the two groups are now rivals. The Kochs are also not
major funders for the Club for Growth. The groups themselves often back
the same candidates and causes, but are sometimes at odds. FreedomWorks
has taken a harder line on the government shutdown than Americans for
Prosperity, and the Senate Conservatives Fund is currently running ads
in Arizona denouncing one of the Club for Growth’s favorite senators,
Jeff Flake, for opposing the attempt to link the continuing resolution
to the repeal of Obamacare.
What the groups share is an attempt to
tap into the spirit of middle American radicalism. They espouse a
somewhat sanitized (less anti-big business and Wall Street) version of
the Tea Party’s economic libertarianism. They want to elect “champions
of economic freedom” who are for “limited government.” They scorn
compromise and the Republicans who make the compromises. “I think the
whole concept of compromise and bipartisanship is silly,” Chocola says.
Their ultimate goal, Chocola says, is to elect a “majority of true
fiscal conservatives” who will transform the government—or in the
meantime, gum up the works by making compromise difficult, if not
impossible.
To date, the groups have had a mixed record in
elections. They screwed up in Nevada, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, and
Missouri by backing extreme Republicans in Senate primaries who lost
winnable elections to Democrats. But they helped elect Senators Toomey,
Cruz, Rubio, Flake, and Paul and about 15 House members, including
Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton whom they are now backing in the Arkansas
senate race.
These are still relatively small numbers, but in the
peculiar American system, a few people can exert an inordinate amount of
power. In the Senate, the Tea Party adherents can disrupt any attempts
at compromise, as Senator Ted Cruz did recently. In the House, they can
threaten John Boehner’s job, because Boehner needs an absolute majority
of House members to retain his speakership. And numbers aside, the
threat of a primary challenge (now converted into a verb “to primary”)
hovers over the all Republican Senate and House members, most notably
McConnell, and has forced Boehner and McConnell to follow dutifully the
shutdown strategy of Cruz and his House allies.
Under
pressure from grassroots radicals and the new outsider groups, the old
Republican coalition is beginning to shatter. The single-issue and
evangelical groups have been superseded by right-wing populist groups,
which are generally identified with the Tea Party, although there is no
single Tea Party organization. These groups can’t easily be co-opted by
the party’s Washington leadership. And the business groups in
Washington, who funded the party over the last two decades, have grown
disillusioned with a party that appears to be increasingly held hostage
by its radical base and by outsider groups. The newspapers are
now filled with stories about business opposition to the shutdown
strategy, and there are even hints of business groups backing challenges
to Tea Party candidates. “The business community has got to stand up
and say we are not going to back the most self-described conservative
candidate. We are going to back the candidates that are the most
rational,” says John Feehery, a former aide to DeLay and Hastert who is
now president of Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a Washington lobbying
firm.
What Washington business lobbyists say on-the-record about
the House Republicans and about Tea Party activists pales before what
they are willing to say if their names aren't used. One former
Republican staffer says of the anti-establishment groups, “They want to
go in and fuck shit up. These non-corporate non-establishmentarian
guys—that is exactly what they are doing. And the problem with that is
obvious. What next? What happens after you fuck shit up?” Other
lobbyists I talked to cited John Calhoun, Dixiecrats and Richard
Hofstadter’s essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” to
explain the rise of the populist right. It’s the kind of reference you’d
expect to read in a New Republicarticle, but not necessarily in a conversation with a business lobbyist.
One
could argue, of course, that the Republican Party will readapt to its
rightwing base and eventually create a new majority of “true fiscal
conservatives” who will disdain compromise. But there is reason to
believe that Chocola and the Club for Growth will never achieve their
objective. Rightwing populism, like its predecessor, Christian
conservatism, is intense in its commitment, but ultimately limited in
its appeal. Tea Party Republicans and the outsider groups probably had
their greatest impact when they were still emerging phenomena in the
2010 elections. But when the Republican Party becomes identified with
the radical right, it will begin to lose ground even in districts that
Republicans and polling experts now regard as safe. That happened
earlier with the Christian Coalition, which enjoyed immense influence
within the Republican Party until the Republican Party began to be
identified with it.
In Washington, today’s business lobbies may
come to understand what the lobbies of the ‘50s grasped—that the
Democratic Party is a small “c” conservative party that has sought to
preserve and protect American capitalism by sanding off its rough edges.
Joe Echevarria, the chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and
consulting firm, recently toldThe New York Times,
“I’m a Republican by definition and by registration, but the party
seems to have split into two factions.” Echevarria added that while the
Democrats also had an extreme faction, it had no power in the party,
while the Republican’s extreme faction did. “The extreme right has 90
seats in the House,” he said. “Occupy Wall Street has no seats.” That
realization could lead business to resume splitting its contributions,
which would spell trouble for the Republicans.
Republicans in
Washington could repudiate their radical base and shun the groups that
appeal to it. That is roughly what people like Feehery are suggesting.
But the question, then, is what would be the Republican base? How would
Republicans win elections? Are there enough rational Republicans to make
up for the loss of the radical ones?
What is happening in the
Republican Party today is reminiscent of what happened to the Democrats
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time, the Democrats in
Washington were faced by a grassroots revolt from the new left over the
war in Vietnam and from the white South over the party’s support for
civil rights. It took the Democrats over two decades to do undo the
damage—to create a party coalition that united the leadership in
Washington with the base and that was capable of winning national
elections. The Republicans could be facing a similar split between their
base and their Washington leadership, and it could cripple them not
just in the 2014 and 2016 elections, but for decades to come.